


love like a dark cloud full of rain

by coloredink



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Body Horror, Canon-Typical Violence, Fairy Tale Elements, Hannibal Loves Will, Hannibal is Hannibal, Heartache, M/M, Magical Realism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-28
Updated: 2015-10-28
Packaged: 2018-04-28 16:08:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5096873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coloredink/pseuds/coloredink
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The other kids were always taking their hearts out," said Will.  "The usual games, I'll show you mine if you show me yours.  But mine didn't seem to work that way.  It never seemed to want to come out."</p><p>or,</p><p>Let it be a fairy tale.  Once upon a time, there was a boy who was careless with his heart...</p>
            </blockquote>





	love like a dark cloud full of rain

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to emungere, who asked a lot of questions about this one.

Once upon a time, there was a boy who was careless with his heart.

This was not unusual. Children are careless with their dolls and their stuffed animals and their train sets, and their hearts are no different. Fortunately, hearts are durable: a heart, once broken, will eventually repair itself, and though they can be misplaced, they will always be found.

But Hannibal Lecter was not so little, and yet he was careless with his heart. He was always giving it to his sister to play with, and she _was_ quite little, but she would give him her heart in return and so it seemed quite all right. And if he found his heart in the garden later, or under the table in the dining room, well, it wasn't as if it could come to any harm there, and he always knew where it was when he went looking.

It was his heart that led him to her body; she was still clutching it in her cold hands. And if Hannibal reacted poorly, well; perhaps it was because he'd given his heart away. Or perhaps he'd always been like this.

\-----

"The other kids were always taking their hearts out," said Will. "The usual games, I'll show you mine if you show me yours. But mine didn't seem to work that way. It never seemed to want to come out."

"A side effect of the empathy disorder, perhaps," said Dr. Lecter. "You carry a double burden of emotion, and yet you're unable to share your heart." After a lengthy pause, he added, "It sounds like a lonely existence."

"You would know something about that," Will said. He snapped his gaze away from Dr. Lecter's tie. His three-piece suits concealed all manner of sins, but Will knew anyway. He felt the absence of someone else's heart as an absence of battering sensation.

Dr. Lecter was a curiosity in more ways than one. No heart, but no ring, necklace, or bracelet; no one else's heart beating in its place. Children gave their hearts away all the time, but adults were more circumspect; hearts were reserved for lovers, life-long partners, the church, beloved children. Perhaps he was widowed and had had his heart buried along with his spouse, but if that were the case he would still be wearing his ring.

"Sorry," Will bit out. "That was rude."

Dr. Lecter tilted his head. His interest in Will's condition was intrigued, but not prurient, which was a relief to Will. "You've never been in love, then."

Will's chest tightened against his spine. "No."

"Other men fear their isolation, but yours is understandable to you," said Dr. Lecter. "You are alone because you are unique."

"I'm as alone as you are," Will retorted. His armrests made a sound of protest against the tension of his fingers.

"Yes." Dr. Lecter's lips twitched. "We're just alike, you and I."

\-----

Will had an inkling that he might be in trouble when Dr. Lecter gave him a look of such _pride_ over Randall Tier's body.

Who had ever looked at him like that before? Nobody; nobody at all. Not when he brought home straight As in fifth grade; not when he was accepted to the police academy; not when he got that scholarship to George Washington University. Will had hardly known his mother; his father thought he'd had ideas above his station and hated cops; and after that he'd been alone. Dr. Lecter had been right; he'd never feared his isolation. He knew it was because his heart wasn't right. It remained locked inside his body instead of being freely given.

He felt his heart leap and tremble when Hannibal took his hand and clucked over his bloodied knuckles, and the rest of him followed suit when Hannibal ran the warm water, shook in the epsom salts, caressed his damaged flesh. Hannibal was always touching him. A hand on his shoulder, a hand on his face, his skin against Will's skin.

"I'm quite pleased," Hannibal said as he wound a cloth bandage around Will's hand. "So pleased, in fact, that I almost have some regrets."

"Almost?" said Will.

"I make it a point to never have any regrets about anything," said Hannibal. "Nor guilt, nor anything that keeps me from enjoying the present moment. But once in a while, I drop a teacup on the floor, and I'm not satisfied when it doesn't gather itself up again. I sweep it up, dispose of the pieces, think no more of it--but next time I am serving tea, I realize that I am short a cup."

Will stared over Hannibal's shoulder. To his right, fuzzy in his peripheral vision, was Randall Tier's broken body, splayed over Hannibal's table like an offering. Which it was. "What happened to your heart?"

"I left it behind," Hannibal said. "I had no further use for it." He laid Will's hands to rest on the table, as reverent as a pilgrim at prayer. "Now," he said, raising his eyes to Will's, "will you be staying for dinner?"

"Of course," Will replied automatically. At some point he had stopped thinking of Hannibal as _Dr. Lecter_. That was going to be a problem, but at that point it was probably too late.

\-----

"This isn't sustainable," Will said. "We're going to get caught."

Hannibal put down his pencil. This was not the first time Will had watched him sketch, but the first time he had seen something like emotion on the paper. More often than not Hannibal treated it as some kind of memory exercise: streets in Florence where he had been; medical illustrations he had once glanced upon; replicas of famous paintings that hung on museum walls. Will looked at the bowed line of Achilles' back, the anguish on his face as he bent over his friend, and he looked away. This was Hannibal without his heart; what would it be like to have that passion in the palm of his hand?

"If Jack told you he suspects me, it means he suspects you," Will said.

"I know," Hannibal replied.

The other day, Will had brought Hannibal a piece of _long pig_ and the ingredients for lomo saltado, and they had cooked together. Will considered himself an indifferent cook at best, and by Hannibal's standards he must be positively sloppy. But Hannibal hadn't remarked on the thick, uneven slices of ginger or misshapen pepper pieces, and he'd watched Will as if Will were Michelangelo at work on David.

Will's heart ached all the time now. It wanted to crawl out of his chest and into the hollow cavern of Hannibal's ribs, so that Hannibal could feel how he felt. Will wanted to give it; he wanted to stop feeling this way. But he couldn't.

\-----

"You wanted to be seen," Will breathed.

Holding himself together was as instinctive as it was futile; blood pooled around him anyway, sticky and dark. He'd seen it so many times at crime scenes that the analysis was automatic: here was where the body lay; here was how long it took him to bleed out and die.

He could hear Abigail whimpering. He wished she would run. Hannibal wouldn't chase her right now.

"You gave me a rare gift," Will said. The words tasted like blood in his mouth. "But I couldn't return it."

Hannibal looked down at Will. His eyes were very dark and full of a great and heavy sadness. "I wanted to change you, the way you changed me."

Will could just barely manage a smile of triumph.

Hannibal sighed. "Well. There is still one way." He kneeled, and the knife flashed down.

Will screamed because it _hurt_. It hurt worse than being shot by Jack; worse than waking up in prison day after day; worse than being gutted by Hannibal, even. Did it hurt for everyone else like this? How did anyone do it?

"I forgive you, Will," Hannibal said as if from a great distance. "Will you forgive me?"

The pain stopped. Hannibal rose to his feet, Will's heart in his left hand, throbbing and bloody. Will watched him bring it to his lips as if from far away.

Hannibal beckoned to Abigail, who came as if she'd been tugged on a string. Will realized a moment too late what was going to happen, and it gave him only time to say, "No, no, no, don't--"

\-----

It was a relief, in the days after what the press had dubbed "The Last Supper," that Will was without his heart.

He didn't weep. Nor did he shout, when Tattlecrime published photos of Will unconscious in his bed with a gory, wrecked hole in his chest. He lied without affect to the Baltimore PD, when they came, and the FBI. Was this what it was like to be Hannibal Lecter? To feel the sorrow and the rage, but not be controlled by it?

"Why did Hannibal take your heart?" Alana asked, then Jack, then Chilton, and all the members of the press.

"He wanted to hurt me," Will told them, except for the press, whom he told "No comment."

Will knew something that they didn't, and it was that Hannibal still had his heart. It tugged him eastward, across the Atlantic. But there was no urgency, and so Will walked his dogs and ate his careful doctor-approved diet and got stronger. He repaired that boat motor he'd had in a crate in his house for ages and purchased a great deal of rope and sailcloth. There was no one left to harangue him (well, except for Freddie Lounds): Alana had her own recovery to attend to, and Jack Crawford had his wife, and Abigail...

Well. Abigail.

It took the right amount of time. By the time the boat was ready, so was he.

\-----

Will prowled among the headstones, not knowing what it was he sought but knowing that it had to be here. The stone tablets leaned and tilted at angles to each other, some of them crumbling, like a mouthful of crooked and decaying teeth. Weeds ran amok on the untended graves; ivy and moss crawled on the unkept headstones.

Except for one.

MISCHA LECTER  
BELOVED

Will stood before it with trembling hands, breathing hard for reasons not having to do with exertion. Flowers had been laid on the short grass, not fresh, perhaps left over from yesterday or the day before. He knelt and threw them aside before ripping up the turf with his bare hands.

"It's not healing to see your childhood home," Hannibal said behind him. "But it helps you measure whether you're broken, how and why, assuming you want to know."

The smell of fresh earth rose up into Will's nostrils. The ground was damp and easy to move. "I want to know. Is this where construction began?" he asked.

"On my memory palace? Its door at the center of my mind. And here you are, feeling for the latch."

"It's not the latch I'm looking for." Will's fingers collided with something soft and solid. He brushed away the dirt, worked his fingers around it, and lifted it out of its hole. It was wrapped in the remains of a white handkerchief. Will felt pulsing in his hand as he unfolded the half-rotten linen.

Hannibal's heart had withered, so long away from its owner and any human contact, blackened in spots and scarred over in others. Its beat was steady but faint. Will held it and thought of Hannibal as a young man--no, as a boy still, a teenager--scooping a hole out of the fresh earth on his sister's grave and leaving his heart behind. Never returning. What kind of person did that?

"What happened to you here, Hannibal?" he whispered.

"Nothing happened to me," Hannibal said in his ear. "I happened."

\-----

When Will was certain Pazzi was gone, he headed down through the dark tunnels, down and down, the gloom broken only by the yellow light of the occasional candle-lit wall sconce. The air smelled ancient and stale. He could hear nothing but his own blood rushing through his body.

"Hannibal," he said into the inky depths. "I know you're here. You know I'm here too; you know what I have."

No response. Will came to a stop at an intersection and strained to hear his heartbeat. He couldn't hear it, but he knew it was here. He could feel it pulling him, just as it'd called him all the way across the ocean.

Will pulled Hannibal's heart from his jacket pocket. It was still wrapped in its handkerchief, but now it was protected by a glass jar. Inelegant, but it was what Will had on hand. He wondered how Hannibal kept Will's heart.

"I forgive you," Will said, and waited.

A footstep scuffed the ground nearby. Will's heart would have raced, if he'd still had one, but he didn't, and so he remained calm. He held his ground as Hannibal appeared out of the gloom. Hannibal wasn't in one of the three-piece suits that Will remembered, but dressed all in black, and his hair was a little longer. He smiled, when he saw Will, and Will smiled helplessly back. It was so _good_ to see him.

"If I saw you every day, forever, Will," Hannibal murmured as he came to a stop in front of Will. "I would remember this time."

"It's strange, seeing you here in front of me," Will said. "Been staring at afterimages of you in places you haven't been for years."

Hannibal nodded to the jar in Will's hand. "And did it help you understand me?"

"It helped me understand. It didn't explain." Will offered the jar.

Hannibal took the vessel, but he didn't open it. He bent his head over the throbbing organ and said, "It's smaller than I remember."

"It hasn't been given the opportunity to grow," said Will. "What did you do with my heart, Hannibal?"

Hannibal didn't answer. He didn't even look at Will. Will studied Hannibal's profile in the dim, flickering light and let his gaze drift to the heart beating away in its jar. He'd been able to feel it in his pocket, though the sound was very faint through the glass. He still couldn't hear or feel his, though he knew it was here, right beside him.

"Oh my God." Will put his hand over his mouth. "Oh my God."

"I thought it would help me forgive you," Hannibal said in a small voice. "It worked once before."

Something like a hysterical giggle forced its way past Will's lips. He clutched at Hannibal's shoulder as his knees threatened to give way. Hannibal grasped Will's arm to help steady him. "And did it?" Will gasped.

"No," Hannibal said, and now he sounded very sad.

Will looked up. Their faces were very close. "How did you eat it?"

Hannibal licked his lips. "Raw, in a tartare."

"Okay, I'm not doing that," said Will. He tightened his grip on Hannibal's shoulder, surely leaving marks in the leather. "This is going to be cooked. You're going to cook it."

He had stunned Hannibal into silence. And now, yes, here was Hannibal with his heart: here was that fierce and hungry devotion welling up in his eyes. Will wanted it; he would have it forever. It was only fair.

"Yes," said Will. "Yes, I will. Yes. Quid pro quo."

\---end---

**Author's Note:**

> [coloredink.tumblr.com](http://coloredink.tumblr.com/)
> 
> [sumiwrites.wordpress.com](https://sumiwrites.wordpress.com/) (if you wanna see the books I've written)


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